The Rings of Power: Truss’s cabinet in disguise

Here we go with another long-running franchise given a makeover, complete with choices so fizzingly awful they set the fan community abuzz.

Just what were people thinking casting a lead character so cold, aloof, and lacking charisma? Then there’s the matter of supporting characters cast across ethnicities when tradition tells us they’ve always been white. But, even if the latter is not a problem (and it certainly isn’t), there’s still the problem with the show’s genesis. Did anybody even bother to read the source material, let alone understand it? There’s a lot of money behind this production, so is this dead-on-arrival product the best they could do? There’s so much to discuss, just where do we begin?

But what’s that you say? Amazon’s Rings of Power isn’t that bad?

Well, I’m sure it isn’t. Only, I wasn’t talking about Amazon’s much-mocked adaptation of Tolkien’s appendices. I was talking about the new Conservative cabinet led by the Galadriel of British Politics.

As much as it’s a relief to finally return to Middle Earth after months of frolicking on the sunny uplands of Brexit with that good time goofball, Tom Bojobadil, it doesn’t take long to realise quite what we have in front of us. Politics has been taken over by elves and not just elves but those super ideological unworldly types from the Elvish Ring Group. That means a government run by elves so detached from reality that they don’t understand what drives us poor hobbits stuck in our remote shire rubbing our hairy feet to keep warm. And as laboured as this conceit might feel, British politics does share more than a few problems with Amazon’s troubled vision of Middle Earth.

The beating heart of Lord of the Rings was always found in the comforts of ordinary life: a warm hearth, a brewing kettle rattling on the hob, and peaceful domesticity, all set against the otherworldly threat coming out of the East. The reason Amazon misjudged so badly has nothing to do with their choosing a diverse cast. The whiteness of Tolkien’s world was always as problematic as the past whiteness of so many British cabinets. But the choice of leading with Galadriel was a misstep. In the books, she represented an ideal, “as beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!’”

Maybe Jeff Bezos was projecting a little too much but the choice to lead with a character so alien to human experiences was a poor one. Yet it’s the same miscalculation as committed by the Conservatives, going heavy with a Margaret Thatcher cosplayer and the fellowship of the European Research Group. As people worry about energy prices in the face of Vladimir Sauron’s threat, the government need to offer reassurances that speak to the practicalities of life and not to the feelings of multinational corporations. Now is not the time for a government run by people with pointy ears and who measure time by the EON (or EDF or Octopus…) Nor is it reassuring at a time of an energy crisis to see the Treebeard of British politics put in charge of supplies. If Jacob-Trees Mogg is the answer to the current crisis, then I’ve got a magic ring to sell you…

This is Liz Truss’ primary opportunity (and one she seems to be missing) now that she’s in Number 10. The leadership debate was dominated by the kind of ideological babble that passes over most people’s heads. Trickle-down economics, Keynesianism, supply-side economics… they can sound as dull as Tolkien’s footnotes describing the philology of a dwarfish diphthong. Talk of rebooting industry (let’s not dwell for too long on why this didn’t happen in the past 12 years) offers a vision of the country as unappealing as a vision of the Shire (spoiler alert) taken over by Saruman at the close of The Return of the King. Welcome to the Amazon warehouse of Middle Earth: “They’re always a-hammering and a-letting out a smoke and a stench, and there isn’t no peace even at night in Hobbiton. And they pour out filth a purpose; they’ve fouled all the lower Water, and it’s getting down into Brandywine. If they want to make the Shire into a desert, they’re going the right way about it.”

Other than the business community, it’s not clear how this message is meant to play to the broader electorate aware of the disparity between their pay and the profits of big industry. What’s strange is that our new Prime Minister doesn’t seem willing to adapt her message and seems happy to allow such a stark (and, frankly, unsettling) difference to be drawn between the Tories under her leadership and Labour.

Odd too when she has been so many things in her journey through politics. As Gandalf proves, wizards can change colour, but he only achieved that once by going from grey to white. Liz Truss’s has been Lib Dem orange, Remainer blue, Brexiteer navy, and now, on the steps of Number 10, a blue so dark it’s almost midnight grey. She has moved from opposing the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act and supporting the legalisation of cannabis to appointing the hugely problematic figure of Suella Braverman to the Home Office. And it’s here where the parallels run dry. A move so stunningly poor has no equivalent in Tolkien’s world. It’s well beyond the realms of fantasy. Not even King Théoden wasn’t so addled by Grima Wormtongue’s poison to have considered a hugely problematic Attorney General for yet another promotion.

We face a difficult winter with a new government in place run by people underqualified, untested or both. We can only wish them well at the same time as regretting that there isn’t somebody with the simple practical sense of Sam Gamgee in there to assure us that “in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer.”

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